Dawn Powell’s Masterful Gossip: Why Won't It Sell?

At midnight on Sunday, July 15th, the online bidding period for the complete diaries of the novelist Dawn Powell quietly came to an end. There was no buyer. There were no serious bids at all.

Tim Page, Powell’s biographer and the owner of the forty-three handwritten volumes, was anticipating a feeding frenzy for the diaries—when we met at a small café on Mott Street a week before the auction closed, he told me he was expecting “a very busy Sunday”—even with the outsized starting price of five hundred thousand dollars. “Half a million dollars won’t buy you a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan,” he said, sipping a Peroni. “But here is this unique work of gossip, of literary history. These are some of the great diaries of New York. The only other satirist in her league is Mark Twain. I don’t like using gender labels, but I really do think Powell is our finest woman writer. You can’t easily put a price on that.”

In need of a financial windfall, Page decided to bypass the traditional auction-house route. Though he purchased the diaries in 1995 along with “boxes and boxes” of Powell’s papers for only thirty-five thousand dollars (ten thousand of which he borrowed from his mother), he was convinced that they had exponentially appreciated in value since his many efforts to revive Powell’s literary reputation. “Auction houses take a third of the profits off the top,” he explained. “And they have no solid proof that Powell is worth something. Lots of people are in love with her, but she has no real track record, so they tend to lowball.” Conversations with Columbia University, which houses the bulk of Page’s Powell archive on loan, ended in a standstill. The time had come to offer up his treasures to the general public.

Page whipped up a Web site, dawnpowelldiaries.com, populating it with hundreds of high-resolution images of Powell’s incisive scribbles about her adopted city and the life of an artist within it. He posted some ground rules—the buyer had to agree to keep the papers available to the public and would not own the copyright—and announced the auction in the New York Times. Within days, he told me, the site received “several thousand hits,” many of them repeat visitors. “I’m usually a lousy businessman,” he said. “But I think that means that the right people are finding me, and finding Dawn. I can’t imagine that a collector wouldn’t want them on their shelves. My only stipulation is that they don’t go to some egotistical idiot. I couldn’t live with myself. My first loyalty is to the materials.”

“The truth is,” he continued, growing quiet. “I could certainly use the money. I need the money. The fact that I am having to struggle with mortgages and debts at fifty-seven strikes me as unfair. I’ve been working hard for Powell since my thirties. I’ve done a tremendous amount for her estate, and I’ve never been in it for glory. Now she has a chance to help me. I’m sure she would understand. In fact, I bet she would buy me a drink.”

Dawn Powell, who died, in 1965, at the age of sixty-nine, with nearly all of her sixteen novels and nine plays out of print, is a classic “writer’s writer.” She wrote with the kind of highly attuned, neurotic, slashing wit that others in the business love—she struck out at her craft, her contemporaries, and her own ambitions, and she aimed for the heart. In 1942, writing in her diary, she expressed the desire for her work to be “delicate and cutting—nothing will cut New York but a diamond. It should be crystal in quality, sharp as the skyline and relentlessly true.”

Powell was a master of urban observation. As Lorrie Moore wrote, “She loved the salty and the anecdotal.” From the moment she left behind her harsh upbringing in Mount Gilead, Ohio, and arrived in Manhattan, in 1918, she dove into city life with an outlander’s anthropological zeal. (“There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love,” she wrote). In her diaries, she expressed her joy of landing in bohemian Greenwich Village, “where all night long typewriters click, people sing in the streets, hurdy gurdies go all day and the laundry boy reads Turgenev.”

In her novels, Powell turned her perceptive talents to social satire. “A Time To Be Born,” from 1942, a thinly veiled sendup of the society couple Henry and Clare Booth Luce and her biggest commercial success, contained a characteristically smart link between modern fashion and a growing social anxiety: “This was a time when the true signs of war were the lavish plumage of the women; Fifth Avenue dress shops and the finer restaurants were filled with these vanguards of war. Look at the jewels, the rare pelts, the gaudy birds on elaborate hair-dress and know that war was here; already the women had inherited the earth.” In a 1987 essay responsible for reintroducing Powell’s name into conversations after two decades of silence, Gore Vidal, who knew Powell briefly, at the end of her life, wrote of the above passage: “I know of no one else who has got so well the essence of that first war-year before we all went away to the best years of no one’s life.”

Powell managed to carve out a small, diamond-like space for herself in New York’s literary scene despite the kind of hardships that might have kept lesser writers from their work. She married the poet and copywriter Joseph Gousha, and they had a severely handicapped son, JoJo, who once attacked Powell with such force that she spent over two weeks in the hospital. She struggled with alcoholism, pill dependency, infidelity, professional jealousy, and a rare chest tumor so large that it began to crack her ribs. Through it all, she kept the kind of company modernist scholars dream about—Gerald and Sara Murphy, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, John Dos Passos, and Maxwell Perkins, the editor she shared with Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Powell’s novels met with critical if not commercial success in her lifetime, but her greatest achievement was her virtuosic private writing about her friends and lovers, something she may have intuited when she demarcated her diaries as “publishable” in her will. Yet for almost thirty years, the diaries were missing. Gore Vidal never mentioned them—he didn’t yet know they existed. That discovery fell to Tim Page, who became “enamored” with Powell after reading Vidal’s essay and stumbling upon a 1962 New Yorker review of her final novel.

Page was working as a classical-music critic for the Washington Post at the time, but he decided to leap headfirst into a second career as a Powell revivalist after realizing that no formal biography of her had been published. (A lifelong serial obsessive due to Asperger’s syndrome, Page described editing Powell’s diaries and letters in this magazine, in 2007, as almost a fever dream, a command that hit him demanding that he obey: “It was as though they had been accomplished by somebody else,” he wrote.) “I don’t know why these strange fascinations grip me,” he said to me, at the café. “But I’ve been in the throes of them all my life. I also thought I should memorize the World Book encyclopedia at one point.”

Not every biographer gets so involved as to stage an coup against a subject’s estate, but that’s exactly what Page did. He flew to bucolic Shelby, Ohio, to meet with Powell’s first cousin Jack Sherman, and, while there, realized that her diaries had been sitting dormant and inaccessible since her death. The estate’s named executrix, the philanthropist Jacqueline Miller Rice, had been something of a deadbeat guardian, failing to return letters from scholars in search of Powell breadcrumbs or to deliver any of Powell’s materials to academic archives for public use. Together, Page and Sherman waged a lengthy legal battle to emancipate Powell’s papers, and when they succeeded, Page cobbled together the funds to buy the archive himself. “I just didn’t want them going to Texas, or somewhere like that,” he said. “I needed to use them.”

All biographers act on the hunch that their subject’s lives are worth the effort, but the biographers who focus on obscure subjects act with the romantic faith of the idealistic entrepreneur. Being the first person to take on an unproven subject is both a risk and an investment; you are the entire cottage industry. If your hunch is correct, being there first can bring rewards—no one had written the story of Zelda Fitzgerald when Nancy Milford took it on as a young graduate student; now “Zelda” is a cornerstone of both Fitzgerald and feminist studies. Had Milford been in a position to purchase Zelda’s papers or art work early on she may have found herself in an even more enviable position.

The danger of investing in Dawn Powell, as Page has discovered, is that sheer will alone cannot spark a literary resurgence. For five years, Page did what he could to justify his purchase. Between 1995 and 2000, he published an edited edition of the diaries, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, a well-received biography, several reissues of Powell’s novels and plays, and a collection of letters. And while Powell earned a level of cultural cachet as a result of Page’s efforts (Rory Gilmore, the smarty-pants college intellectual in the popular sitcom “Gilmore Girls,” once called Powell her favorite underground writer: “She made the jokes that Dorothy Parker got credit for”), she still has a legacy problem.

Literary revivals need help, from either Hollywood (in the case of Richard Yates) or a major public figure (in the case of Faulkner and Oprah), and, so far, Powell has had neither. When I spoke to Thomas Staley, the director of the University of Texas Ransom Center (which Page says made an early bid for the Powell papers for the price of a “medium-sized car” in the nineties, though Staley’s research into Ransom’s history turned up no such bid), he said that he would have been interested in taking on the diaries, but only as an “interesting bit of history for specialists.” “It’s not as if she was Hemingway, you know? She had contacts. She knew people. But was she a major international figure? No. Page is naïve to think he can ask that kind of money for them, and as a private seller.”

“There are really only four or five places in the world that would want these diaries,” Staley added. “And while we would be interested in them as a donation, I can’t see us getting involved in a bidding war. I get it—he found interesting material, he exploited it, used it, now he wants to sell it. I’m just not convinced that he’ll get what he wants out of it.”

One of the first things Page likes to tell people about Dawn Powell is where she is buried. When she died of colon cancer, Powell donated her body to Cornell Medical Center, with the stipulation that her remains would be returned to her family when science was done with her. Five years later, the body was used up, and the question of next steps fell to her old friend Rice, who curtly replied that Cornell should “dispose of the remains of Dawn Powell in the City Cemetery, as the family does not wish to take possession.”

As Page uncovered in his biography, Powell’s family, the majority of whom were living in the Midwest, were never informed that they had a choice about her burial. Rice asserted that Powell would have been despondent about leaving New York—“She would have hated being in Ohio forever!”—but she could not have intended for Powell to be buried in a mass grave with deceased inmates from Riker’s Island. Powell’s body now rests on Hart Island, a small strip at the easternmost tip of the Bronx. She is one of only two or three “celebrities” buried there; the others are the city’s unclaimed homeless, stillborn babies, prison inmates, and criminally insane. She shares the island with an abandoned women’s asylum and a tubercularium.

For a time, Powell’s family attempted to exhume her body, but it was a lost cause. All that’s left of her is the work, and the words, always just on the cusp of becoming a bigger thing. As Moore wrote, “Even during [Powell’s] own lifetime, her struggling though productive career seems to have been in constant semirevival. Novels fell quickly out of print; reviews of her new ones often wondered why no one read her more.”

Page’s devotion to Powell grew out of pure curiosity and fandom into biographer as self-sublimating saint. He hopes that his attempt to sell off part of his collection won’t damage this reputation. “They told me it couldn’t be done, and they were right,” he said to me after the sale, whispering from an Amtrak quiet car. “But I don’t regret trying. If I had sold these to the wrong guy, and they were lost or thrown to the wind, there would have been real damage done. It hurt that someone e-mailed to call me a profiteer during this process—I fought hard to free these diaries, and I just want to make a living. But it’s probably better that they didn’t go to a weird person from the Internet.”

Page plans to shutter dawnpowelldiaries.com for good by the end of the month, and, for now, he will keep the diaries in the hope that he can strike a deal with Columbia or another public archive. “I’m just ready to move on from Dawn,” he said. “She spent her whole life trying to keep her head above water, and so am I. We’ll probably meet up at a bar in heaven and have a good laugh.”

Rachel Syme is a cultural critic currently at work on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood years.

Photograph by Marvin Lichtner/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Rachel Syme has been a contributor to The New Yorker, where she covers fashion, style, and consumer culture for On and Off the Avenue, since 2012.